Fear and Trembling
by Enkay
Summary: Sasuke isn't afraid of the dark. He's afraid of what might come lurking out of it that he isn't strong enough to face. And Naruto—he wants to touch Naruto, as badly as he knows he would flinch if the Uzumaki boy ever reached out to him. NaruSasu, oneshot.


Also known as "Sasuke Gets a Boner." I intended this as a short little glimpse into how _I _view both his personality and his relationship with Naruto, and it turned into… this. Maybe that says something about me, I don't know. Two things:

1. This story spits in the canon storyline's eye and laughs at it. There are references to Sasuke's past, which are actually pretty important in the scheme of the story, but otherwise you can disregard all that plot ridiculousness. The boys are about fourteen and on some overnight mission with Team Kakashi. That is all you need to know.

2. This may actually be a little too risqué for this website. I am not a terribly good judge of these things. But if you think that may be the case, let me know and I'll try to censor myself… I guess. Whatever.

IN ANY CASE. Enjoy. I feel pretty good about this one, but that's probably just because I actually finished something. I really need to stick to writing one-shots.

**FEAR AND TREMBLING**

what-the-fuck Naruto fanfic by Enkay

Naruto falls asleep immediately, like a little kid. It's one of those stupid, insignificant little things about him that annoys the hell out of Sasuke, unlike the bigger things like his voice and his dumb orange jumpsuit and his obnoxious personality, which annoy everyone, period. The room they're sharing as they make their way back to Konoha, resting for the night after a long, tiresome mission, is stiflingly quiet, and as Sasuke lies on his back and stares at the ceiling he tries to figure out how he feels about these nights they spend in the same room, quietly breathing the same air without the necessity of conflict.

He can feel the slow ache behind his eyes that speaks of sleep deprivation, but he can't quite bring himself to relax—there's something about how the moonlight breaks in through the window, reflecting everything in blue; the buzz of silence behind his ears. The warmth he is trying his very hardest to pretend he can't feel to his left. Sasuke isn't used to warmth. He feels like he should turn onto his side, so that the two of them will be back to back and he'll have nothing but the dark shadows and blue-white of the moonlight to attract his eyes, but his body will do nothing but lie dumbly on its back, his eyes trained expertly on the ceiling for fear of what else they might seek out under the cover of night.

Sasuke isn't afraid of the dark. He's afraid of what might come lurking out of it that he isn't strong enough to face. And Naruto—he wants to touch Naruto, as badly as he knows he would flinch if the Uzumaki boy ever reached out to him. Sasuke imagines the texture of the calluses laid into the curl of his friend's fingers, the smoothness of the translucent hairs lining Naruto's dusky forearm, and his fingers twitch at the very thought--just slightly, enough to remind himself that really,_ really_, all he needs right now is to fall asleep. He _should_ be resting up for the long trek home the next day, half of which will almost definitely be spent bickering with the boy curled up next to him. But somehow—somehow—his eyes won't close. And somehow, he finds his head has turned, stiffly and seemingly against his will, his gaze latching onto the back of Naruto's head.

He doesn't realize how hard his heart is beating until he feels it pounding in his ears, a thick heat encompassing most of his face. The back of Naruto's neck is slender; the tension in his shoulders tangible even through the black t-shirt he wore to bed and the worn blankets that have come to rest around his elbows. When he's in a bed by himself, Naruto fights its coverings, much like he fights everything else: without direction or any semblance of grace. Sasuke always wakes up in the morning to see his teammate sprawled across the bed or hanging half out of his sleeping bag on the hard ground, a stupid grin alighting on his face as he wins battles in his dreams. Invariably, Sasuke rolls his eyes and turns away. This is something he's used to. Dumb, predictable, typical Naruto behavior: sharply irritating and immediately dismissable. Every once in a while, however, he feels the formula begin to break down; Sasuke knows he would easily be able to categorize Naruto's sleeping habits as yet another stupid thing about him were there not nights like this one, when Sasuke is lying right next to him and Naruto just curls up against the wall and doesn't move a muscle, until morning has broken and Sasuke has already risen from an admittedly fitful slumber. Is it Sasuke's presence? Is the idiot still trying to one-up him, even in his sleep? Sasuke doesn't know, but something about it has begun to bother him, nagging at him incessantly even when they're _not_ on missions and Uzumaki Naruto has no business being in his head.

Sasuke stares at the back of Naruto's head and wishes his teammate were facing the other way. He wants to see Naruto's face. In all likelihood he's drooling all over the pillow, his face relaxed into that idiotic, slack-jawed expression that never fails to spike Sasuke's irritation. Or maybe he's still—his lips parted slightly and his eyelashes fluttering as his eyes shiver with sleep. Naruto has long eyelashes. It's something Sasuke wishes he hadn't noticed, since they've become something he can't help but stare at every time the two of them are close enough in proximity--when Naruto drags him off to Ichiraku and falls asleep right on the counter, his head drooping onto his folded arms, or when they've just gotten back from a mission and Naruto slings his arm around Sasuke's shoulders and grins at him like there isn't this tension between them that 'rival' doesn't quite cover anymore. Or when they're just about to jump headlong into a situation in which they might just die and they know it, and they look at each other with something in each of their gazes that Sasuke doesn't want to piece together. Because Sasuke can't touch Naruto he looks, and because he can't look Naruto in the face he stares at the back of his head—his eyes travelling over the short hairs at the back of his friend's neck and down over the curve of his shoulder, unnaturally still in the wake of Sasuke's own shadow.

"Idiot," he murmurs, his voice barely a whisper of a sigh.

Naruto's shoulders tighten.

Sasuke jerks with surprise, and fear--real fear, like anything he might feel during a mission, but sharper somehow, less weighted down with the headiness of his shinobi training. He bites his lip and realizes he is trembling, a desperate, weak-kneed sort of trembling that seems to spread outward from the heat of his gut into every hidden crevice of his body. The heat of his blush rages from his cheeks down through his chest and his stomach and further, lighting his skin on fire and making it unbearable to the touch. He expels the air harshly from his lungs, his clenched fists trembling at his sides as he attempts to get his body under control, but every agonizing second seems to force his temperature higher and higher. In a spurt of panic he yanks the blanket off of the bed and throws it around himself, wrapping his searing skin in the dark material. He sits on the side of the bed, his face pressed into his knees, and sweats and trembles and counts backward from ten in his head, willing the feeling with all his might just to go away.

"The hell, bastard?"

Sasuke's breath catches in his throat. The mattress shifts under them as Naruto sits up, his concurrent sigh ripping through the silence of the room. Sasuke remains motionless, his teeth beginning to grind at his own unacceptable lapse in discipline, and it's either this or his persisting silence that prompts Naruto's continued movement; a second creak of the bed. "... Sasuke? Hey, are you...? Are you all ri—"

Naruto's fingers barely brush Sasuke's shoulder before Sasuke flinches, so harshly that the bed creaks under Naruto again as he draws back his hand. "Please don't touch me," Sasuke says, his voice hoarse with disuse, and as his shaking hands pull the blanket tighter around him, its edges brush against both his trembling thighs and the swell of hardness between his legs. He gulps, forcing down the whimper that is threatening to claw its way up his throat. He's never felt so vulnerable before, and so petrified because of it.

No. Once before. Only once.

"I'm... all right," he says finally, his words falling like stones into the heavy silence warping the air. "I'm fine, so you should... you just go back to sleep, and I'll be okay... in a little bit."

"Right," Naruto says skeptically, uncomfortably, and Sasuke is cursing himself now, half-certain that Naruto already knows about his predicament, has been able to guess; if only he hadn't panicked, if only he could turn back the last thirty seconds of his life and play it cool, retain his same icy composure, so that even if Naruto did happen to find out Sasuke could just scowl and kick his friend under the covers and say that it just _happened_ sometimes, all right, because what kind of fourteen-year-old boy would he be if it didn't?, and then Naruto could laugh and kick him back and say something like gee, Sasuke, maybe you're a real person after all, and maybe the blond would lord it over him for a couple of weeks, okay, but that was all part of the game, and now that Sasuke has broken the rules so spectacularly Naruto doesn't seem to know what to do with him. _Just wait,_ Sasuke's conscience says tightly, as if he's fucked something up that it doesn't know whether it'll be able to fix. He lets himself get sucked into its familiar lull, even as he feels his body shudder in misery at the denial of release. _Wait it out, like you said you would. You can still get out of this. You can make this disappear._

And it might have worked--the whole thing may have blown over as an odd moment that would emerge the next morning as nothing more than a strange fragment of a quasi-lucid dream--had Sasuke not forgotten about one of the little things about Naruto that he hated the very most: the idiot's apparent need to involve himself in absolutely everyone's problems, no matter how much it would benefit him just to sit back and stay the fuck out of it.

"If you're sick, we hafta tell Kakashi-sensei," Naruto says, and even through the blanket Sasuke can feel his friend's breath on the back of his neck. The genuine concern in Naruto's voice, still palpable under layers of self-consciousness and grudging pretension, momentarily takes his breath away, so that he forgets to balk at the warmth of the blond's fingers as they grip his arm. "I'm not gonna let you pull your pretentious bullshit if you actually need help--"

Sasuke isn't sure what gets him, whether it's the actual physical contact or the comment about his "pretentious bullshit," but before Naruto is able to register the movement he's swung himself around and forced himself into the space between Naruto's arms, his forehead smacking against his friend's collarbone. His arms are shoved against Naruto's chest between them; he feels rather than hears Naruto's sharp intake of air as his knee brushes against Sasuke's erection.

"You want to help me?" Sasuke says, his voice heavy and muffled against the blond's collarbone. "Well? _Help me_."

The silence stretches out impossibly long between them. Sasuke can almost hear Naruto's thought process in the thump of his heartbeat as he sits there, motionless, his chest barely rising with breath, until finally, slowly, his hand slides over his own leg and hovers over the inside of Sasuke's, his fingers brushing over the soft cotton of Sasuke's crotch. Sasuke lets out a harsh breath at the contact, his teeth pressing together hard as Naruto begins to run his fingers lightly, awkwardly, up and down the length of Sasuke's penis. He leans into Naruto's touch, his heart hammering away in his chest, and it's almost as if he's splitting away from himself; he's leaving the Uchiha Sasuke he was and had always been behind as he begins to give shape to an alterego, an Uchiha Sasuke who would, who _could_, sit back and let the thorn in his side, his rival, his best friend, touch him in ways no one had ever touched him before. The fear is still there, but he can feel it starting to give way to something greater.

"Sasuke," Naruto says in a hoarse whisper, his voice unbearably loud in Sasuke's ear, "I... I can't really... you need to--"

So Sasuke lies down on his back, throwing his arm over his eyes and twisting his head to the side as the blanket comes to rest around his shoulders. He hears the bed creak as Naruto repositions himself, hesitation apparent in his ministrations as he strokes Sasuke lightly with his thumb. With every movement, however, Naruto gains a little more confidence, falling into a steady rhythm, using just a little bit more pressure, and with every shy touch Sasuke feels a little bit more of his old self slipping away and escaping into the night.

Naruto's fingers travel upward, coming to rest at the top of his pajama pants, and the sudden change pulls Sasuke a little back into himself, a muffled gasp escaping into the crook of his arm. Naruto stops, but only for a moment; Sasuke has to hold in a long, shuddering breath as Naruto's hand slips into his pants and then his boxers, his fingers tangling briefly in the curls of pubic hair before brushing against his shaft. A surreal giddiness wells up in the Uchiha's chest as Naruto slowly regains his prior rhythm, his sweaty hand now flush against Sasuke's flesh; with his eyes closed, it almost seems as if it's his own hand administering these gentle touches, so in tune they are with the candence of his breathing and the shallow, jerky gyrations of his hips, which he has begun to find harder and harder to control—but no, he tells himself, no, these are Naruto's fingers, Naruto's hand, Naruto's touch; Naruto, Naruto, Naruto. He feels the syllables of his teammate's name forming on his tongue and clenches his teeth hard, the sound coming out as a wordless murmur. Naruto exhales heavily, his fingers stalling, before he takes Sasuke's dick in his hand and repositions it, the night air hitting its tip as it pokes out over the top of his pajama pants. Sasuke tries to bite back his reaction to the change in temperature, but he can't help it; a breathy expulsion of air escapes his lips, ending in a whimper that makes his stomach clench in shame. Naruto rubs his thumb over the head of Sasuke's penis, his breathing turning ragged.

Hesitantly, Sasuke moves his other hand, the one that has been resting on his chest and clutching unconsciously at his t-shirt; he tugs lightly at the waist of his pants, attempting to pull them down over his hip. Naruto's free hand immediately moves to help him, and together they slide Sasuke's pants and boxers down over his thighs, freeing his erection. Sasuke lets go immediately, his fingers tightening into into a grip on the sheets, but his eyes fly open when Naruto rips his pajama bottoms completely off, the weight of the fabric falling onto the floor beside the bed without so much as a word from his end. Sasuke forces his eyes closed again, but not before he's treated to a view of his own pale, bare legs, blue-white in the moonlight and bent loosely at the knees. He tries to sit up, but the motion is interrupted as Naruto parts his legs awkwardly and leans over him, his one hand returning to stroke the pubic hair at the base of Sasuke's dick as the other plants itself firmly on the mattress at Sasuke's side, steadying his position. Sasuke freezes, his neglected organ throbbing as he breathes in the sudden closeness of Naruto's hair, his skin. Aside from the hand at his crotch, Naruto isn't touching him, not quite, but it's his very _nearness_ that causes makes it so hard to breathe as Naruto's palm slides up the expanse of his stomach, pushing his t-shirt up under his armpits. He feels Naruto's fingers pause as they reach his sternum, the only warning for the flush of sensation that accompanies his thumb brushing over Sasuke's nipple. Sasuke keens, a high-pitched, desperate sound that he wouldn't have believed he was able to make. His knee presses into Naruto's hipbone, still fully clothed; he bites his tongue, holding back further wanton _noises_ as Naruto puts more pressure on his nipple, the smell of his skin maddening, and maddeningly close.

And this is all well and good, Sasuke thinks, as far as he can pursue any sort of thought process, but nothing can quite distract from the insistent throbbing of his penis, which Naruto has in effect left to fend for itself, and the spike of irritation Sasuke feels at his thoughtlessness, totally alien amidst the flush of other, entirely new emotions that are welling up inside him, makes him forget himself; for a split second it feels almost as if they are just Sasuke and Naruto again, without the distorting tint of this thing that's begun to grow between them, and in that split second Sasuke opens his eyes to glare at his friend, to glare at him and to tell him to get his hand back on his goddamn dick, and in this moment he catches sight of Naruto's face.

He has vaguely registered the raggedness of Naruto's breathing, the way the hand that's splayed against the mattress seems to be shaking in the effort to hold up his weight, but the curve of his cheek in the dim moonlight, the part of his trembling lips and the way his golden hair frames his face as Naruto leans over him—that's something else entirely. Sasuke stares up at his friend, captivated, his own walls completely down, and receives an immediate mental image of the two of them standing hand-in-hand on the edge of a cliff, millimeters away from toppling over into the abyss. Naruto gulps, and Sasuke can't help but gape at the swell of his throat, the wetness in his eyes. "Sasuke," he says softly, hoarsely, and Sasuke feels himself blushing at the sound of his name falling from those lips. "Sasuke, I... you..."

It would be so easy, Sasuke thinks. He could just reach up and wrap his arms around Naruto's shoulders; run his fingers through Naruto's hair. He could kiss Naruto, and Naruto would kiss him back, and even though neither of them really knew how to kiss they would figure it out, their tongues tangling in each others' mouths as they crushed their bodies together, and Sasuke would quickly get rid of Naruto's clothes and just as quickly cover every inch of Naruto's body with his mouth, kissing and sucking and teasing until Naruto couldn't do anything but moan and cry and whisper things in Sasuke's ear that it set Sasuke's skin on fire just to think about. It would be _too_ easy, as easy as it is to get lost in Naruto's eyes. Sasuke looks up at his teammate, his friend, his _best_ friend, his face glazed over with desire, and thinks that somehow, because of this person, _with_ this person, he could be happy.

But even before Sasuke even really knows what he's doing he finds himself turning over onto his side, flinging the blanket back over himself and wincing as his engorged penis presses against the mattress, harder than it's ever been, a little bit of precum spilling over the edge to dirty the sheet.

"Sasuke?" He's never heard Naruto sound so confused, or so hurt. He doesn't move to touch Sasuke again—but then, that's to be expected. The spell has been broken; the rules set back into place. "What's wro--"

"This was a mistake," Sasuke says into the fabric of the blanket, and his voice sounds more like his own than it has all night. Naruto says nothing. Sasuke forces his silence out of his head, forces Uzumaki Naruto, to the best of his ability, out of his thoughts, and begins to feel that old familiar coldness settling over him, as his erection begins to wither and die.

Eventually the mattress creaks as Naruto moves away from him, curling up without a blanket on the far side of the bed, but for all Sasuke's attempts to regulate his breathing and settle into the numbness of sleep he can't shut off his brain, reliving all that had happened in the last ten minutes—had it been only ten minutes?—ad nauseum, until it blurs into an overall impression of Naruto's touch, Naruto's breath, Naruto's eyes. He's all too aware of his nakedness, his penis nestled limply into the curve of his inner thigh, and of the rage of his conscience, flogging him mercilessly for his gross indiscretion. The shame is beginning to curdle anew in his gut, joined newly with disbelief, and, for the first time, regret.

He sets his sights once again on the morning. In the morning he'll get up right as the sun breaks the horizon, and he'll pull on his boxers and his pajama pants and he won't look at Naruto, even when the boy's sleeping form tugs insistently on his line of sight, as he knows it will. He'll get his things together and go downstairs to get breakfast, and when his teammate emerges he won't look at Naruto, and on the trek home he won't look at Naruto, and when they separate after reaching Konoha he'll look past Naruto as if he isn't even there. On their next mission he won't look at Naruto, and when he sees him in town he'll do the same, on and on for the days and months and years to come as he sets out on the course that he's chosen for his life to take, and Sasuke has to clutch at his chest to quell the sob of misery that's trying to force its way out from deep inside him.


End file.
